His lab's work is the most interesting I've come across in a long while. In the recent interview I linked, he says they have another paper coming out soon with even more wild stuff. He gets more into his ideas about why his methods work in the podcast as well. It's so cool to be tuned in to a candidate for the most impactful bio research of the next 20 years.
I find it hard to believe too, but at the same time, Demis Hassabis has also said that AI will help us "colonize the galaxy" in as little as five years [1]. Maybe Sam Altman was emboldened by Hassabis' statement.
I would not be opposed to living in a future where I can personally live in space. It would be quite fun.
To extend my previous comparison, I believe Altman and Hassabis are the ones in the smoky room passing a joint around the circle. They’re absolutely emboldened by each other but that doesn’t mean they’re tethered to reality.
(my comparison is incomplete though, it doesn’t factor in that these two also have a huge financial incentive to be hyping this stuff up)
Five years wouldn’t be enough time to “colonise” Antarctica, let alone another planet (just one!), and certainly not anything at a larger scale, even if we were visited by aliens tomorrow and they gifted us five hundred spaceships to give us a boost.
> “If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.”
You are confusing "era of maximum human flourishing ... begin to happen" with "have colonized galaxy".
Well, I didn't say I look forward to living in a tiny capsule in space, just that it would be fun to live in a time where that's possible. I'd imagine most people would not venture into space until they can make it comfortable enough.
Seriously. It would be like living on a submarine. But I guess if you don't like sky, mountains, beaches, nature, weather, animals, etc... Like, if you hate the outdoors and spend all your time in windowless rooms with poor air quality? Then OK, maybe space is for you? Also the food is probably going to be extremely monotonous, so that also needs to not matter.
Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
when white people call me chinese ching chong it's not racism, but when arab people say something about bangladeshi, then of course it's racism? i have a couple guesses as to why you would think this way and it's sad.
You said it was “students” that yelled that. As I mentioned, I had a similar experience in school where another kid mocked my skin color. But these kids aren’t saying that stuff based on some racial ideology. Kids are mean and will pick up on any characteristic to mock other kids. Kids also mocked me for reading during recess. Why should I perceive these instances of childish bullying differently?
The comments by the Arabs, by contrast, is based on a racial ideology. Though I don’t get worked up about it because who cares about a random interaction at the mall? The only thing I’ve ever experienced that I’d call material racism is the social exclusion by Indian people. Because that arises in professional or workplace contexts.
Why are you asking this given what the parent comment described? Are you accusing them of lying or blowing things out of proportion? I'm truly, honestly happy that you have not experienced anything like what the parent comment described. But I grew up in west coast America and I still experienced a lot of casual racism. Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.
People don’t shout anything at me, racial or otherwise. Certainly not “1 in 20” strangers on the street. So I find OP’s story difficult to believe and likely lacking context.
> Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.
Is this “racism” or bad manners/people trying to get a rise out of you? Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian, or would he have yelled at you if you were white—just with a different comment? Same for the kids in school—if you were different in another way (fat, skinny, etc) would they have shouted that at you instead?
Do you think you’ve ever been materially prejudiced because you were Asian rather than white?
again, super happy for you. but i feel some people try to go out of their way to convince themselves that racism is not at play even when it clearly is, because it paints a picture where they are somehow "better" than those who experience hatred. the guy who yelled at me to park farther away, when I called him out on what he said, he walked up to me in an imposing manner and said, "so yeah, I can be a little racist, so what are you going to do, mr. china?" I'm not even chinese.
this is just an anecdote, and you don't have to believe what i say. but i think racism (against asians) is very real and many people are affected by it every day.
I assume such events are randomly distributed. So I’m talking about your reaction, not the conduct itself.
What I find odd is the impact of this negative interaction in a parking lot. Do you think the guy wouldn’t have yelled at you had you been white? If not, what’s the real difference between “this isn’t China” and “are you blind?”
your point is racism towards asians does not exist, because these random assholes are being assholes toward random targets and they would basically act the same way to other white people. i disagree. i believe what the grandparent comment described about their partner's experience in rural town america is more or less true. you are free to think they are a liar or an outlier. but when people you have never interacted with call you a chinese ching chong on the street when you're just walking home, you have to admit there is some racial element to their abuse. would they have yelled anything at me if i were just another white dude in their predominantly white neighborhood? somehow i highly doubt that.
no, i don't think these people go about their lives consciously trying to be especially mean to asian people. most of them have probably just internalized certain biases against asians. for the sake of convenience, i and many others have decided to categorize such patterns of behavior as racism.
again, you are free to believe that racism is not real. if you are squarely within that camp, i doubt anything i say will change your mind.
As I already told you (yes, you), I doubt anything I say will change your mind. I do hope one day you will come to see that yelling ching chong at an asian man on the street should be seen as racist if you think a bunch of Arabs were being racists just because they said the word "Bangladeshi."
Please do. I assume your post breaks this guideline:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Amusingly for this discussion, I started reading 'rayiner about a decade ago (long before this account) specifically because he seemed intelligent but I disagreed with him about issues involving race and the South! Being accused of being 'rayiner is an amazing twist to the story.
Re: your experiences — racists (and bigots in general) are a lot more likely to voice the bigoted things they're thinking, when the target of their vitriol looks like someone who wouldn't fight back against what they're saying. So: women (when the speaker is male and physically larger); old people; people with disabilities; etc. It's the same victim-selection logic that criminals use.
If you're the sort of person who would never expect to get randomly fucked with on the street, then you shouldn't expect to be the target of voiced bigotry, either.
> Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian
Yes, 100% it was because she was Asian.
The small town I grew up in is effectively 100% white (just by coincidence of history); but exists near some major global cities (like the one I live in now) that have a good mix of ethnicities, and especially an increasingly-large percentage of Asian people.
Due to various economic factors, many otherwise-well-to-do people can no longer afford to live in the big cities. This includes many immigrants of other races who originally moved to this country to live in these big cities, and have never visited the rest of the country. These people (including the immigrants) started off just moving to commuter suburbs — but as those shot up in land value as well, people are now increasingly moving to outlying non-cosmopolitan small towns, which do still have lower land values.
And that's shifting the demographics of these small towns.
This wave of demographic shift has not yet reached the town I grew up in.
AFAICT there is a sentiment among people who live there that they don't want "outsiders" — i.e. immigrants / anyone who's not a tenth-generation resident of the country — to move into the town. The sight of such people — especially when those people are "city slickers" doing "tourist" things in the town — enrages them.
So, it's not a prejudice these people have that's specific to any one race of people — but it is a racially-motivated prejudice. It is, essentially, a racial purity mindset — whether the people living there would call it that or not. (I say "racial purity" generally rather than "white supremacist" specifically, because this dynamic exists in provincial small towns in every country that's currently experiencing demographic shift — with the people in those small towns being bigots against any ethnicity other than their own, but especially against whichever ethnicities are increasing in prevalence in the countrie's large cities and beginning to "spill over" into small towns.)
You describe the music you want in text and it generates the whole music with or without lyrics (your choice) a la stable diffusion. You can optionally supply it with your own lyrics. I don't think it counts as "creating music" yet but with inpainting and better tooling, it can probably get to where text to image generation is today in short order.
No. Thus far no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things. AI agents generate, at best, mediocre and derivative content and at worst, soulless nightmares out of the uncanny valley. None of it has any sense of originality or a specific creative touch or vision, nor can it given the way LLMs work. All this despite the consistent refrain from people that LLMs work exactly the same way that human beings do, with equivalent creative processes. Thus far, such claims only demonstrate a quasi-religious belief not backed up by evidence, or equivalent results.
And if it were somehow to be the case that AI was capable of building amazing things, it would be the AI doing so, not people. You can go to a Michelin starred restaurant and order a world-class meal, but describing your order doesn't make you a chef. In the same way, describing what you want to an AI that simulates the work of countless artists doesn't make you an artist.
And no, this isn't equivalent to an artist using tools and filters in Photoshop (although Photoshop is now moving to integrating AI so it kind of is.) Those are tools that still require the skill and talent of an artist and allow a degree of direct control over the end result that AI doesn't.
While no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things and I agree with your food and artwork analogies, AI agents can work as fantastic teachers, lowering the technical barriers of entry for fields like programming.
ChatGPT can’t retain decent context to save its life but if you have the time, patience, and motivation to widdle away at a goal or a project you, yourself, can come out on the other side far more capable of building amazing things, thanks to AI. These are things you could have learned through other mediums, sure, but for a lot of people it is a far more natural experience akin to talking with a teacher, especially if you structure your prompts to feels as such.
I’m not ride-or-die AI over here but it has taken me from a painfully non-technical person, to someone who now has a vast interest and a growing, albeit slowly, skill set in a new hobby. It will be a long long time before I create something that isn’t derivative but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been valuable along the way.
I'm happy it works for you, but given the general consensus about the quality of AI generated code (not great beyond trivial tasks and full of bugs) and AI's tendency to confabulate, I think tutorials by human beings are still the better option in general.
Right, no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things. I just thought if current trends hold and big corps keep gobbling up everything to create bigger and better AI models, then even average people will have a lot to gain from it if big corps actually successfully build intelligent AI. Because then the playground would be leveled.
The playground is already more level than it would be if the primary tools for creativity were driven by corporate controlled AI, because those corporations have no intention of allowing the playground to be level. It's never going to be legal for you to make the next Star Wars, or possible for the average person to make something that can compete with the big media companies, without paying a lot of money and giving up a lot of rights.
Meanwhile the tools to create in just about any medium are almost entirely freely available to anyone, and plenty of people are already creating tons of amazing things. AI isn't necessary for that, it's just a means for corporations to commoditize human creativity.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea that Professor Remzi and his wife Andrea wrote a book on Operating Systems. I loved his class (took it almost 22 years ago.) Will have to check his book out.
I can highly recommend CS50 from Harvard (https://www.youtube.com/@cs50). Even after being involved in tech for 25+ years, I learnt a lot from just the first lecture alone.
Disclosure: Professor Malan is a friend of mine, but I was a fan of CS50 long before that!
+ the primary source of microplastic particle generation in most households is the washing and drying of (plastic) clothes. I don't have evidence to back this up, but I have a feeling you breathe in more plastic fiber particles every time you remove lint from your dryer than you ingest through your mouth the whole year.
+ the more processed a food is, the higher its microplastic concentration [1] - apparently breaded shrimp is the worst.
I am very concerned by this really. After putting on that hoodie, take a look at your fingertips, and then your eyelashes. Microplastic fibers are everywhere and they are electrostatically attracted to you. At times it will feel like they are chasing you.
20 min ted talk - https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c
3 hr lex fridman episode - https://youtu.be/p3lsYlod5OU